Alice Munro Nobel Prize-winning writer

Writer Alice Munro, who has died aged 92, became the 13th woman and the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for her collections of short stories, set usually in southern Ontario, that managed to invest the humdrum events and parochial dramas of daily small-town life with a haunting significance.

Widely admired for her spare and understated fiction, her work was often compared with that of Chekhov, in that plot is secondary and there is little action.

The short story was always her most effective form and she found meaning in tiny family events, the closed worlds of individual lives in a particular corner of Canada.

Of Scottish ancestry, Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, on July 10, 1931. Her family’s origins lay in the Ettrick valley, between Edinburgh and the Borders; in later life her father, a failed fox fur farmer turned-nightwatchman, wrote a novel called The McGregors, and although Alice was schooled in the domestic virtues of cooking and needlework, she felt drawn to writing from the age of nine.

Having won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, she was still a student when she sold her first short story, and gradually began selling others to small Canadian magazines. Eventually she graduated to The New Yorker, in which her mature work often appeared.

Her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), touching on the pangs of adolescence and the discovery that happiness can be fleeting, earned her the Governor-General’s fiction award, the most important literary prize in Canada.

Despite her many accolades, Munro considered herself “a plodder”, untrammelled by sudden bursts of inspiration. She wrote slowly, covering two or three pages a day in longhand, before spending months revising at a keyboard.

She was married twice, first, in 1951, to James Munro, with whom she had three daughters. In 1976, she married the geographer Gerard Fremlin, who died in 2013.